Bishopston, Italian Restaurant Guide

This “very busy Italian neighbourhood bistro” in Westbury Park was set up by floorlayers Olly Gallery and Julian Faiello – and what a success their professional volte-face has proved, with a successive wave of talented local chefs passing through its doors over the past decade. The crowd-pleasing menu – spanning arancini, pasta dishes and sourdough pizzas – features some “very good” food which you can now enjoy on the heated, fairy-lit terrace: a Covid-era addition.

This “reliable” venue from the “good-quality chain” serves “generous portions of traditional Italian food in a stylish ambience” – one of Bristol’s busiest restaurants for 30 years, it was Carlo Distefano’s first outside Birmingham as he set about creating what is now a global group, with an increasing presence in the Middle East.

A characterful city-centre building backdrops this “very relaxed” (and trendy) wine bar and osteria – regarded as “one of the best restaurants in Bristol” nowadays. Cosmo Sterck (of London luminaries Brawn and St John) turns out “fantastic Italian food” from a “small menu with great ingredients and lots of nice sharing starters”, while his wife Lily looks after the wines, which are of the organic and biodynamic kind. Kudos for the “bargain set lunch” (two courses £24 per person, three courses £27 per person) – “the price of a main course in many less impressive establishments”.

Mark and Karen Chapman opened Cor (see also) in Bedminster three years ago and this newcomer in a shipping container on Wapping Wharf by the water in April 2025. Its launch was too late for feedback in our annual diners’ poll but online and press reviews are a rave with the Guardian’s Grace Dent in June 2025 hailing what might well be her “favourite new restaurant of 2025” – “a cool, minimal, romantic ode to Italian cooking” with “some of the most skilful cooking anywhere in Britain right now”. And in August 2025, The Daily Mail’s Tom Parker Bowles was scarcely less impressed with a menu with “no faff or fuss, just cooking that captures the pared-back purity of proper Italian food” – “every ingredient is immaculate, and all it takes is a sprinkle of salt and still more grassy, peppery olive oil, to create a dish of pure summertime succour. Classic, but beautifully done”. Grace’s Top Menu Tip – Ashton Court venison, “cooked rare but as soft as butter, and served on pungent gorgonzola with bone marrow butter”.

2023 Review: ‘Authentically Italian, sustainably British’ says the tagline of this new Wapping Wharf container restaurant, run by friends Gilda Lombardi and Delphi Ross, which specialises in numerous varieties of pasta made on-site daily. It opened in May 2022 – too late to generate feedback in our annual diners’ poll – but the Bristol press says it’s proving a big hit locally.

“Fabulous small plates in a buzzy environment” have established this tiny neighbourhood spot on a corner site in Bedminster as one of the new stars of the Bristol culinary scene – and many people’s “favourite”, for its “interesting”, Mediterranean-inspired cuisine. Australian chef Mark Chapman and his wife Karen last year opened their follow-up, an Italian restaurant called Ragù at Wapping Wharf.

“Consistently superb” (and “very busy”) Italian bistro “in the heart of Bath” that’s “remarkably good value for the quality” – “fish a speciality of the chef, but other dishes are equally worth trying”, and everything is “lovingly presented, and served with enthusiasm and knowledge”.